In the beginning, scientists aren't actually sure what happened in the beginning.

Specifically, they don't know exactly how life on Earth began.

Most researchers agree that it involved water, which is why last week in the first episode

of our origin series, we explored where Earth's water may have come from.

But now that our watery stage is set, we've still got what might be an even bigger question.

What happened next? How did we go from having a bunch of water to having a bunch of

life in that water? Some researchers have this kind of wild approach to finding out how life

started. They're trying to make it themselves, to recreate life in a lab.

Science writer Michael Marshall wrote a whole book about this quest, and our intrepid reporter,

Bird Pinkerton, reached out to him to hear more about these weird, wonderful experiments.

The story Michael Marshall told me begins in the 1950s, and it starts with a Nobel prize-winning

professor named Harold Yuri. He was a chemist who, at that point, was only a few years away

from retirement. And Michael says that in the final decades of his career, Harold Yuri had gotten

into all kinds of interesting projects, including trying to figure out what the early Earth might

have looked like after water had come about, but before we had life yet. He used what was known

about the chemistry of other planets to come up with a vision of Earth billions of years ago,

suggesting that it might have been this hot world with oceans and canos, lightning, and lots of

ammonia and methane. And from that kind of wild vision came an even wilder idea. If you could

recreate that early world in a lab, kind of in miniature, could you answer a fundamental question

about our origins? This question of, yeah, how did life come about? What was the mechanism?

This is where one of Harold Yuri's students comes in. This guy named Stanley Miller.

Miller eventually approached him and said, well, why don't we try it?

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